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The Problems Right Now For Gaming On Linux

12-30-2012, 03:50 PM

Phoronix: The Problems Right Now For Gaming On Linux

While 2013 is shaping up to be the best year for gaming on Linux with so many major milestones just ahead of us, it's not without some unfortunate sore points still present for gaming and the Linux desktop...

I'm not really sure why "fragmentation" is still an argument when referring to Linux, really.

If I were in the position of making the decision about porting a product (game) to Linux, here's what I would see:

Ubuntu is the most popular desktop distribution. It is backed by a for-profit company which aims to bring the Ubuntu distribution into the mainstream. Ubuntu has a long-term support release which backports new features related to graphics drivers and hardware support (therefore "fast release cycle" is a moot argument). Along with its huge number of users, this distro also has notable derivatives such as Linux Mint which are fully compatible with Ubuntu. Supporting Ubuntu will support a large chunk of the Linux community.

Fedora is another large distribution with a huge following. Supporting the latest release (or previous) would be harder than Ubuntu, but would only require more work. Supporting Fedora would make it easier to support RHEL (and other EL distributions such as CentOS, Scientific Linux, ROSA, etc).

Users of Arch (or other "advanced" distros) don't really require hand-holding. Chances are, someone within the community will add Arch-specific packages to AUR or write a guide to make it work.

Etc.

Granted I'm not that familiar with the process in which considerations are made for porting to other platforms, but I don't really understand the "fragmentation" argument. Is it really so hard to decide that supporting Ubuntu (the most used desktop family) instead of Slackware or Yggdrasil is a more logical option?

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I see Steam as being the easy way for many game publishers to avoid the fragmentation issues. They don't have to produce debs or rpms, just package it up however they already do it for Steam. Obviously, there are issues that Steam needs to handle, but Valve is hopefully going to do most of that for them...

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In talking with various game studios, hardware vendors, and other commercial organizations, there's still a stigma attached to Linux that its users want everything for free and aren't very motivated to pay for software or support. There's also an unmeasured portion of Linux desktop users that won't run any games/software if it employs Digital Rights Management.

How true is this?

I mean,I have no problem paying for software and games. They put a lot of work into it. They deserve to make money on it if they desire.

I also have no problem with DRM as long as it doesn't detract from the experience. It's why I like Steam. Steam's DRM for the most part is just silent in the background but if a DRM starts to interfere with my operating system, or shuts down the game if I lose connectivity for a split second, then I have a problem with it.

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I mean,I have no problem paying for software and games. They put a lot of work into it. They deserve to make money on it if they desire.

I also have no problem with DRM as long as it doesn't detract from the experience. It's why I like Steam. Steam's DRM for the most part is just silent in the background but if a DRM starts to interfere with my operating system, or shuts down the game if I lose connectivity for a split second, then I have a problem with it.

Yeah, i wonder. In HIB Linux users always pay clearly the most, so this myth should be put to rest already.

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SLI support is still a weak spot but I think that will improve as games get released (and I believe SLI tends to require certain game profiles in the driver for best performance).

Also, easily installing the latest NVIDIA drivers in Ubuntu has regressed dramatically this year. We can no longer rely on the x-swat PPA being updated and now we have to fiddle around with beta drivers in the Ubuntu System Settings.

There's a shortage of highly-qualified Linux game developer veterans for porting games to Linux. Linux Game Publishing isn't doing much these days and most of the game studios relying upon outside help for porting their titles to Linux are relying solely upon Ryan "Icculus" Gordon. Ryan can only scale so much himself and there's few other names associated as well with Linux game porting; the bus factor is very low in this area. It was already difficult finding high-quality Linux developers for Valve to employ this year, but this is a problem that should be organically overcome when gaming on Linux (hopefully) proves to be commercially viable.

Hell, I'd love to step up to the plate but it seems it would be impossible to even get buy-in from a publisher. There are so many games that really do need to be ported over so that people can access their libraries.

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I mean,I have no problem paying for software and games. They put a lot of work into it. They deserve to make money on it if they desire.

I also have no problem with DRM as long as it doesn't detract from the experience. It's why I like Steam. Steam's DRM for the most part is just silent in the background but if a DRM starts to interfere with my operating system, or shuts down the game if I lose connectivity for a split second, then I have a problem with it.

Guess why your game takes about 30 seconds to start and 2 minutes to load... *points at TF2*.

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Having recently been addicted to getting Linux working as a replacement for windows, I think it's very close, if not there as a replacement to Windows. As I'm rather new to Linux I can give some advice for what I think needs work.

#1 Drivers of course. My test machine has a Radeon 4670 that I've been trying to get working. Problem is the Catalyst drivers for this card is stuck at 12.6, and has lots of bugs. Surprisingly the open source works perfect, so long as you update it. I did get a $30 Nvidia 520 GT card that didn't work with open source. Driver that was used was llvmpipe and only outputted in HDMI. Nvidia proprietary driver though works perfectly.

Even my TV capture card is a pain to get going. Does a Hauppauge HVR 1800 work or not on Linux? Most websites say no, but I've read posts from developers that say that 3.5 or 3.6 kernel has it working. Took and a chance and ordered it. There needs to be better communication on this.

#2 The user interface. I have to give props to XBMC cause they know how to make an elegant UI. MythTV in comparison looks dated. Also for some reason Cinnamon is never mentioned or benchmarked here. It's by far the most complete UI for Linux. It's not a very pretty UI, as I think Unity looks more modern, but it actually works the best.

#3 There needs to be a better way to manage these repositories. I know that Ubuntu has a way to manage them but there has to be a better way. Like putting hotlinks in websites that you can click on and have it added to your system. Cause right now I keep bookmarks for repositories I want. I also ran an update and accidentally got Wine 1.5.20, which doesn't play World of Warcraft anymore. So I gotta downgrade to 1.5.19, which is not a straight forward process.